Plum IVR Support

I'm working on an outbound calling addition to our existing hosted IVR application. When calling my cell phone, callee_type seems to be detected properly. However, when calling my home phone, which is Verizon FIOS it repeatedly (not 100% but greater than 90% of the time) detects the phone as an answering machine even though I've picked up.

Any help that can be offered to help me get around this? Is this a common issue with all VOIP telephones?

Hi,

This issue does occur with some VOIP phones, where it actually "answers" right away (and thus, the IVR application starts), but then plays audio that sounds like a ring to the callee for the callee to "pick up" the phone. This is likely the reason why the callee type detection is incorrectly detecting the phone as an answering machine.

Regards,
Plum Support

This could be a rather serious issue as more people get their home phone service (like me) via their cable/internet provider. What is the current success rate at determining the correct callee type when these services are included?

I just did a test call to my cell phone, picked it up and the callee type was shown as answering machine. How is the determination being made and is there anything I can do to tweak it?

Hi,

Callee type detection is not 100% accurate. The behavior of the callee type detection is to use typical scenarios, such as picking up and saying "Hello," to detect whether or not the callee is a human voice or an answering machine.

In the past we have suggested implementing an introduction prompt in your IVR script that would repeat and require the user to press 1 to continue. For example, the prompt could be:

"Hello, this is a call from Plum. To continue, press 1."

If a 1 was entered, that ensures that a human had picked up the call.

Regards,
Plum Support